13-Jan-2000 First Snowfall
Everyone in Southern New England has been questioning their knowledge of the local climate for the last month. There wasn't any snow until today. Phew! We really do know what the weather is supposed to be like around here. When I went outside to bring in the newspaper at 7:15 this morning, there were a few flakes of snow in the air. By 7:30 it was snowing hard. By 8:15, when I left the house, there was an inch and a half of very light fluffy snow on everything.
Drivers are totally out of practice at driving in snow. After a few storms, people drive a couple of miles per hour slower than usual and leave a little more following distance than usual, but pretty much drive. Today traffic was crawling all over Newton. Traffic was all backed up on a short cross street on my way to the JCC because cars couldn't make it up the slippery hill coming towards me. Two cars were stuck on the hill up to the JCC in front of me. I blinked my lights and went around them. That's why we have two Subarus. The story this morning was, if you don't have four wheel drive or all wheel drive, you don't belong on the road.
A little over 8 years ago I finally learned to swim with a slow, steady crawl that I could maintain for a respectable distance. I was having such a good time doing it that I decided that for a birthday present to myself I would let myself swim my age number of lengths. I've kept it up for birthdays. With a lane to myself, my birthday coming up on Sunday, and the traffic so bad that another 20 minutes in the pool wouldn't get me to work later than everyone else anyway, I decided to jump the gun by a few days. When I got to my age I said, what the heck, another 8 lengths will be a mile, might as well go for it. When I got there I said, really, 1600 meters is just a little short of a mile, I'll do another length. Since I wasn't afraid of getting tired at that point, I shifted into high gear. It felt so good to be going faster that I did another length like that. So I ended up doing 1650 meters. After I got out and showered I wondered if I should have kept going for a full 2 Km.
At Bullough's Pond there were two female hooded mergs so close to the shore that I got out of the car and started to take a picture. Another half dozen birds popped up from underwater just a little farther away. I used up the roll of film, but didn't get the prints yet.
Yesterday a co-worker described a program he thought would be useful. I had already written just such a program, so I updated it yesterday and brought it over for him to try this morning. As soon as he tried it he found the problem that, now that I thought of it, had stopped me from publicizing it earlier: He scrolled a choice box down to "n", let go, and "N" showed up instead. That's a bug. The problem is deep down in Windows. Microsoft figured they would be nice and search for the entry that matched what you chose, regardless of upper- or lower-case. I couldn't find any way to get the window to do a case-sensitive comparison. Finally I put a lot of spaces and a sequence number in the window, with just the first letter showing in the choice box. Now it looks right and keeps the "n" if you choose it; but I can't say it's working right -- only that it looks as though it is!
On the way home I decided to see if the Impreza all wheel drive would really handle a steep hill in the snow. I went home via Blake Street, my bike route, which has the steepest hill I can conveniently get to at its top. The car went right up it without a second's hesitation.
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